Scientists Identify Two Distinct Emotion Regulation Profiles That Shape Mental Health

A new study from Türkiye suggests that the way people regulate their emotions falls into two sharply contrasting patterns, and that the difference between them may help explain why some individuals flourish while others struggle with depression and anxiety. Writing in the journal Current Psychology, Aslıhan Ataman and Özden Yalçınkaya Alkar of Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University used a person-centered statistical approach to identify distinct emotion regulation profiles among 850 adults, and found that the profile a person belonged to was strongly linked to their psychological functioning. The work, grounded in Self-Determination Theory, offers a fresh lens on one of psychology’s most actively debated questions: not simply which emotion regulation strategies are adaptive, but how beliefs and strategies combine within real individuals to produce different mental health outcomes.

Emotion regulation, the set of processes by which people influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience or express them, has long been recognized as a cornerstone of psychological health. Decades of research, beginning with James Gross’s influential process model, have examined individual strategies such as cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression, typically asking how each strategy relates to well-being on average across a sample. But this variable-centered approach has a well-known limitation: it treats strategies as if they operated independently, when in reality people hold bundles of beliefs about emotions and deploy constellations of regulatory modes together. The new study takes the opposite, person-centered route, asking whether empirically identifiable types of emotion regulators exist in the population and whether those types differ meaningfully in their mental health.

The theoretical backbone of the research is Self-Determination Theory, the broad motivational framework developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, which holds that human flourishing depends on the satisfaction of three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Within this framework, a specific mode of regulation called integrative emotion regulation has attracted growing attention. Integrative regulation involves openly acknowledging emotions, exploring them, and allowing their information to be processed and assimilated, rather than pushing them away or acting them out. According to Self-Determination Theory, this integrative processing supports the organismic capacity to transform even difficult emotional experiences into coherent self-knowledge, whereas suppressive forms of regulation, which involve distancing oneself from emotional experience, are thought to frustrate basic needs and undermine well-being over time.

Alongside regulation modes, the researchers examined emotion beliefs, specifically beliefs about the usefulness of emotions and beliefs about the controllability of emotions. Prior work by Tamir, Ford, De Castella, and others has shown that people who view emotions as controllable tend to use more adaptive strategies and report fewer depressive symptoms, while those who believe emotions are uncontrollable are more prone to avoidance-based regulation and psychological distress. Beliefs about whether emotions are useful or useless similarly shape whether people approach or avoid their feelings. The Turkish study is among the first to combine these belief variables with regulation modes, including integrative regulation, suppression, and dysregulation, in a single cluster analysis, thereby capturing the whole configuration of emotion-related processes within each person.

The sample comprised 850 adults recruited from various institutions across Türkiye, including university students, academics, and employees. Women made up 65.9 percent of participants, and the mean age was 35.04 years with a standard deviation of 12.8. Participants completed a battery of validated instruments: the Emotion Regulation Inventory, the Beliefs About Emotions Questionnaire, the Basic Psychological Needs Satisfaction and Frustration Scale, the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 for depression, the Generalized Anxiety Disorder scale, and the Flourishing Scale, a measure of overall psychological well-being developed by Ed Diener and colleagues. The inclusion of both ill-being indicators, such as depression and anxiety symptoms, and well-being indicators, such as need satisfaction and flourishing, allowed the researchers to test whether the emotion regulation profiles differentiated people on both sides of the mental health spectrum.

Methodologically, the study followed a rigorous two-stage clustering procedure. First, the researchers standardized scores on the emotion belief and regulation mode variables and applied Ward’s hierarchical clustering method, which merges individuals into groups in a way that minimizes within-group variance. Second, they used the resulting cluster centers as starting points for K-means refinement, an iterative algorithm that reassigns individuals to the nearest cluster center until the solution stabilizes. This combination, recommended in the methodological literature on person-centered analysis, helps guard against local optima and produces more stable groupings. Statistical guidance on power for cluster analysis, including work by Dalmaijer and colleagues, informed the design, and the sample size comfortably exceeded conventional recommendations for detecting reliable cluster structures.

The analysis yielded a parsimonious two-cluster solution. The first cluster, containing 43.9 percent of participants, reflected a maladaptive regulation profile. Individuals in this group showed higher levels of emotion dysregulation, stronger suppressive tendencies, and stronger beliefs that emotions are uncontrollable, alongside lower levels of integrative regulation and weaker beliefs in the usefulness of emotions. The second cluster, encompassing 56.1 percent of the sample, represented an adaptive regulation profile, marked by the mirror-image pattern: higher integrative regulation and usefulness beliefs, and lower suppression, dysregulation, and uncontrollability beliefs. The fact that beliefs and strategies cohered into just two broad configurations, rather than a fragmented array of mixed types, is itself notable, suggesting that emotion-related processes tend to travel together in internally consistent packages.

The between-profile comparisons were striking. Relative to individuals in the maladaptive profile, those in the adaptive profile reported significantly higher satisfaction of their basic psychological needs and higher flourishing, as well as lower symptoms of depression and anxiety. These findings align closely with the predictions of Self-Determination Theory: integrative emotion regulation is theorized to support need satisfaction by allowing emotional experience to be acknowledged and assimilated, while suppression and dysregulation are theorized to alienate people from their own feelings and frustrate the needs for autonomy and competence. The results also echo earlier cross-cultural work by Benita and colleagues, who found that integrative and suppressive regulation differentially predicted well-being through basic need satisfaction and frustration across three countries, and a person-centered COVID-era study by Waterschoot and colleagues that applied a similar framework during the pandemic.

The study carries practical implications for clinical and counseling psychology. If emotion regulation profiles can be identified reliably with brief self-report instruments, practitioners could potentially screen for maladaptive configurations, characterized by uncontrollability beliefs, suppression, and dysregulation, and target them directly in intervention. Existing evidence suggests that emotion malleability beliefs are themselves modifiable, and that changing beliefs about the controllability of emotions can improve regulation success and reduce symptoms. The person-centered approach adds nuance here: rather than treating a single strategy or belief in isolation, interventions could be designed to shift the entire configuration, for example by fostering usefulness beliefs and integrative processing while reducing reliance on suppression.

The authors are careful to note the study’s limitations. The design is cross-sectional, so the direction of the relationships between regulation profiles and psychological functioning cannot be established; it is equally plausible that depression and anxiety shape how people regulate their emotions as the reverse. The sample was a convenience sample drawn from Türkiye, and although it was diverse in occupation and age, generalization to other cultural contexts requires replication. Self-report measures may also be influenced by the very regulatory tendencies they assess, since high suppressors may be less willing to disclose emotional difficulties. Still, the findings represent a meaningful step forward in emotion regulation research, demonstrating that when the person, rather than the variable, is made the unit of analysis, two coherent and consequential regulatory types emerge, and the difference between them tracks the difference between flourishing and suffering. The study was supported in part by a TÜBİTAK National PhD Scholarship awarded to the first author, who conducted the work as part of her doctoral dissertation, and the data are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Subject of Research: Emotion regulation profiles and their association with psychological functioning

Article Title: Emotion regulation processes and psychological functioning: a cluster analytical approach

Article References: Emotion regulation processes and psychological functioning: a cluster analytical approach. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10009-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10009-8

Keywords: emotion regulation, self-determination theory, cluster analysis, integrative emotion regulation, emotion beliefs, basic psychological needs, well-being, depression, anxiety, flourishing, suppression, person-centered approach